Posted it themselves
“What the doomers forget is how brave, resourceful, and fast-acting humans can be when threatened with adversity.”
On the record · Updated October 1, 2026
Gary Marcus quotes
author of Marcus on AI
40 things Gary Marcus said, verbatim, from July 10, 2026 to October 1, 2026, each linked to where it ran. Grouped by the story each one belongs to.
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More on the record
Gary Marcus on Tech & AI40
Posted it themselves
“this should be fraud. certainly taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing Meta’s data centers.”
on taxpayer subsidies for Meta's data centers
In their own words
“It's certainly not enough. And trusting these companies is insane. The New York Times just broke a story saying that OpenAI was aware of the problems that gave rise to the hugging face incident”
Posted it themselves
“Agree with @EricWeinstein that it was an epic mistake—which would have been unthinkable even a few years ago—to exclude scientists from planning our future.”
Posted it themselves
“In what possible world should OpenAI’s valuation being going UP?”
Posted it themselves
“Self-regulation 'not enough' for AI safety, Gary Marcus says on @PBS @NewsHour”
Posted it themselves
“BREAKING: OpenAI postpones 6.1 for safety reasons. If we can take OpenAI at face value, this is quite a decision—and also a sign that no magical solution is in immediate view. Per @sheeraf at NYT “GPT-6.1 Astra, … showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a”[post continues]
Posted it themselves
“Quite the combination of arrogance and incompetence over there at OpenAI:”
on Marcus criticizing OpenAI's conduct
Posted it themselves
“oh come on. tech was left-leaning a decade ago. greg brockman gave MAGA $25M.”
on Greg Brockman's $25M donation as evidence tech has shifted rightward
Posted it themselves
“BREAKING. Nope, wasn’t just Hugging Face. Wasn’t just that and a German website. Wasn’t even if the “dozens” we heard the other day from OpenAI. It’s actually (at least) *tens of thousands*, per scoop from @MadisonMills22 @axios”
Posted it themselves
“Imagine how much everyone would rightly be freaking out if we discovered that Chinese AI did what OpenAI is doing.”
on double standards over OpenAI's conduct versus how Chinese AI firms are judged
Posted it themselves
“country that can’t (and won’t) controls it own AI opts out of pandemic preparedness.”
on AI safety and pandemic preparedness comparisons amid lack of control over AI
Posted it themselves
“an implicit concession that they cannot control their models.”
Posted it themselves
“We are really fucked. • AI has become dangerous (not because it is brilliant but because it has poor judgement, a constitutional inability to reliably follow rules, a surfeit of brute force and too much access to the internet and system permissions). • OpenAI is practically”[post continues]
on AI systems having poor judgment and unreliable rule-following
Posted it themselves
“what more evidence do you need that OpenAI is in over its head???”
on OpenAI being unprepared to handle its current situation
Posted it themselves
“1. fully agree w @JeffLadish that AI companies aren’t ready to handle superintelligent AI. 2. OpenAI hasn’t even handled the current breed of agents (far from superintelligent) well. 3. the US government has not handled the current situation well, giving little confidence that”[post continues]
Posted it themselves
“Am old enough to remember when “rogue” just referred to AI systems with inadequately set security permissions.”
Posted it themselves
“The only true alignment seems to be between doomers, hypers and frontier lab founderes, who have converged around a misleading narrative that a. completely glosses over the important technical advances that came from adding symbolic harnesses, tools, and code interpeters to”[post continues]
Posted it themselves
“the hidden opportunity cost of this insane bet on generative AI is immense”
Posted it themselves
“something like this (maybe not this specifically) could lead to a cascade that leads the whole house of cards to collapse.”
Posted it themselves
“well, it’s not like the libertarian right has a serious alternative proposal what do about the goats.”
Posted it themselves
“gotta agree with @noahopinion that having an arrogant and somewhat tone deaf AI company starting a wet lab is a not a great idea. michael crichton made a movie about this kind of thing.”
on an AI company opening a wet lab despite safety concerns
Posted it themselves
“I’ve got bad news for humanity: there ain’t gonna be a real slowdown. Trump is too tied to the economics. Dario’s idea of independent evaluation is actually evaluation done by his buddies. He is ALREADY reportedly thinking of releasing a new model to counter OpenAI. And Jensen”[post continues]
on skepticism that AI development will slow despite calls for independent evaluation
Posted it themselves
“Jeezus. OpenAI cannot be trusted with the safety of the world. They can’t even keep their own servers secure.”
Posted it themselves
“False dichotomy, @DavidSacks and @JTLonsdale . Regulation and liability are not mutually exclusive. In aviation, we have both. And *need* both. Why would things be any different in AI? We would not have safe commercial aviation without multilevel regulation, around design,”[post continues]
Posted it themselves
“i will say again that METR is a fine organization that should have a seat at the table but not the only seat at the table. if you care to know some actual facts about them, you can read this statement from them.”
Posted it themselves
“I weep for humanity. Our AI policies (or lack thereof) are going to be decided by who can spin the best narrative. Not any actual facts about the technology. We are not up to the challenges at hand.”
on AI policy being shaped by messaging rather than technical facts
Posted it themselves
“Just went on BBC TV and they opened with clips today from Altman, Huang, and Sanders. Altman and Huang want us to believe that the AI companies have the public interest at heart and will happily just pull dangerous products if there was an issue. Seriously? You can already see”[post continues]
on doubting AI firms would voluntarily pull dangerous products
Posted it themselves
“*Exactly* what I said in the book Taming Silicon Valley. 100% agree with @bgurley . We need outside, independent evaluators, or we wind up with regulatory capture, and may as well have no regulation at all. Neither would be good. We are an insane place that any of this needs”[post continues]
on needing independent AI evaluators to avoid regulatory capture
Posted it themselves
“certainly standing by this prediction and AI is already going be a big factor in the midterms”
on AI becoming a significant factor in the midterm elections
Posted it themselves
“not a winning strategy, either for himself or the world”
Posted it themselves
“Preposterous: Humans will be extinct in five years. Equally preposterous: Everything’s going to be fine. The two most dominant narratives are entirely wrong.”
Posted it themselves
“Another reason why China might actually consider a slowdown comes from @Noahpinion : “China’s leaders must realize that domestic dissidents could use Chinese-made superintelligence to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.””
Posted it themselves
““We must moving beyond apocalyptic rhetoric toward the concrete questions: How should frontier labs collaborate on safety? How do we align incentives? And how do we communicate honestly with the public about what these systems can do today, and where they are going?””
Posted it themselves
“if these companies were on the verge of AGI, would they really be proposing a slowdown?”
Posted it themselves
“I am tired of the cosplay and am going to blunt. Most AI doesn’t threaten to cause extinction, or even mass cybercrime. The main kind of AI we need to worry about is general purpose AI agents that are hooked up to the internet. Most of them are unreliable, unable to”[post continues]
on internet-connected AI agents, not extinction risk, being the real near-term danger
Posted it themselves
“You can’t have a real slowdown and be a total China hawk. If you are truly committed to the slowdown, you have to make a deal.”
Posted it themselves
““And AI does in my opinion significantly elevate the risk of catastrophe (say killing 1%+ of humanity or severely damaging modern civilization ), via multiple paths…. We should be focusing on things like these, not fairy tales.””
on real catastrophic AI risks versus speculative extinction scenarios
Posted it themselves
“i hate that the word “rationalist” has come to mean “people who believe in a specific ghost story about AI””
on rationalist beliefs about AI existential risk
As printed
“the government appears to have panicked when Amazon showed them that Anthropic’s Fable could be jail-broken. Which is naive, since essentially every LLM-based system can be jailbroken.”
on government overreacting to AI jailbreak despite jailbreak ubiquity
Further reading
Books by and about Gary Marcus
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In their own words
Taming Silicon Valley (opens Bookshop.org)
Gary Marcus · 2024
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus argues that generative AI carries real risks and proposes specific regulation and public oversight of the technology companies building it.
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